Video no Botha for Kearsney

ApplianSys is pleased to announce that Kearsney College, a leading private boys high school in South Africa, has purchased a CACHEBOX solution to alleviate bandwidth congestion and facilitate independent learning in its school.

The college has 2 aggregated ADSL fibre links – a 4Mpbs and another 6Mbps one – catering to around 800 users. Having introduced a BYOD scheme, the network was experiencing a lot of congestion from large files, mainly videos and software updates.

IT Manager at the college, Ashwin Premlal, had two main concerns:

When 70 – 80 devices simultaneously accessed the internet, it brought the network to a halt, disrupting classroom time whilst students waited for content.

Ensuring a better online learning experience for students was a key goal.

Ashwin explains: “Teaching has moved to the digital arena: with the use of media and digital devices such as smart boards, projectors and online learning, students enjoy a far more interactive environment. I had a number of teachers who wanted to stream YouTube during their lessons. Due to expensive bandwidth costs, this was difficult to accomplish.”

He searched online for a dedicated web caching appliance to cache large video and software update files, and decided that CACHEBOX was an ideal fit.

Following the deployment of a CACHEBOX050, he was pleased to find that the solution both saved bandwidth and improved browsing speeds in the classroom: “I have had the CACHEBOX050 installed and running for 5 months now and it has been excellent. My environment consists of 60 classrooms with over 600 boys and approximately 70 teachers. I have had various scenarios where teachers stream clips during lessons and the device has performed exceptionally. Furthermore the fact that the caching and retrieval of data is transparent proves very useful to basic computer users, since there’s no per device configuration involved” says Ashwin. “CACHEBOX saves on bandwidth consumption and costs – and increases performance of streaming video very effectively.”

About

Kearsney College opened in 1921 and is a private boarding school for 600 boys in Botha’s Hill, midway between the cities of Durban and Pietermaritzburg. It is recognised as one of the country’s finest schools by way of its distinct moral ethos, high educational standards, and technological foresight. With SMART Boards in over half of the classrooms, students are encouraged to learn in a fun and engaging way.

The Kearsney College Choir is ranked 8th in the world in the latest INTERKULTUR World Rankings. They are 3rd in the world for Scenic Pop and 7th for Scenic Folklore.